The Forbidden Circle

by Marion Zimmer Bradley

  “And you removed her right to choose!”

  “No woman of the Comyn has choice,” Leonie said almost in a whisper, “not truly. I did not choose to be Keeper, or to be sent to a Tower. I was a Hastur, and it was my destiny, just as the destiny of my playmates was to marry and bear sons to their clans. And it was not irrevocable. In my own childhood I knew a woman who had been treated so, and she told me it was reversible. She told me it was lawful, where neutering was not, so that women might be reclaimed, if their parents chose, for those dynastic marriages so dear to Comyn hearts, and there was no chance of impairing the precious fertility of a Comyn daughter!” The sarcasm in her voice was so bitter that Damon quailed.

  “It is reversible—how?” Damon demanded. “Callista cannot live like this, neither Keeper nor free.”

  “I do not know,” Leonie said. “When it was done, I never believed it would have to be reversed, and so I made no plans for this day. But I was glad—as near as anything could make me glad—when she told me I had wrought less well than I thought.” Again he shared with Leonie the brief vision of Callista in Andrew’s arms as he carried her from Corresanti. “But it seems she was mistaken.”

  Leonie looked wrung and exhausted. “Damon, Damon, let her come back to us! Is it so evil a thing, that she should be Lady of Arilinn? Why should she give that up, to be wife to some Terranan and bear his half-caste brats?”

  Damon answered, and knew his voice was shaking, “If she wished to be Lady of Arilinn, I would lay down my life defending her right to remain so. But she has chosen otherwise. She is wife to an honorable man I am proud to call brother, and I do not want to see their happiness destroyed. But even if Andrew were not my friend, I would defend Callista’s right to order her life as she will. To lay down the title of Lady of Arilinn, if she so desires, to be wife to a charcoal-burner in the forest, or to take up sword like the Lady Bruna her foremother and command the Guards in her brother’s place! It is her life, Leonie, not mine or yours!”

  Leonie buried her face in her hands. Her voice was sick and choked. “Be it so, then. She shall have choice, though I had none, though you had none. She shall choose what you men of Darkover have called the only fit life for a woman! And it is I who must suffer for her choice, bearing the weight of Arilinn till Janine is old enough and strong enough to bear the burden.” Her face was so old and bitter that Damon shrank from her.

  But he thought that it was no true burden to her. Once, perhaps, she might have laid it down. But now she had nothing else, and it was everything to her, to have this power of life and death over them all, all the poor wretches who gave their lives for the Towers. It meant much to her, he knew, that Callista had to come to her and beg for what should be hers by right!

  He said, making his voice hard, “It has always been the law. I have heard you say that the life of a Keeper is too hard to be borne unconsenting. And it has always been so, that a Keeper is freed when she can no longer do her work in safety. You said it, yes, you are a Keeper and responsible only for your own conscience. But what is it to be a Keeper, Leonie, if the conscience of a Keeper does not demand an honesty worthy of a Keeper, or of a Hastur!”

  There was another long silence. At last she said, “On the word of a Hastur, Damon, I do not know how it is to be undone. All my search of the records has told me only that in the old days, when this was commonly done—it was done after the Towers had ceased to neuter their Keepers, so that the sacred fertility of a Comynara need not suffer even in theory—such Keepers were sent to Neskaya. So I sought there for the records. Theolinda, at Neskaya, told me that all the manuscripts were destroyed when Neskaya was burned to the ground during the Ages of Chaos. And so, although I still feel Callista should return to us, there is only one way to rediscover what must be done for Callista. Damon, do you know what is meant by Timesearch?”

  He felt a curious rippling coldness, as if the very fabric of the overworld were wavering beneath his feet. “I had heard that technique, too, was lost.”

  “No, for I have done it,” said Leonie. “The course of a river had shifted, and farms and villages all along the watershed were threatened with drought or flood and famine. I did a Timesearch to discover precisely where it had run a hundred years before, so that we could divert it back into a course where it could run, and not waste energy trying to force it to flow without a natural channel. It was not easy.” Her voice was thinned and afraid. “And you would have to go further than I went. You would have to go back before the burning of Neskaya, during the Hastur rebellions. That was an evil time. Could you reach that level, do you think?”

  Damon said slowly, “I can work on many levels of the overworld. There are others, of course, to which I have no access. I do not know how to reach the one where Timesearch can be done.”

  “I can guide you there,” Leonie said. “You know, of course, that the overworlds are only a series of agreements. Here in the gray world it is easier to visualize your physical body moving on a plain of gray space, with thoughtforms for landmarks”—she gestured to the dimly glowing form of Arilinn behind them—“than to approach the truth, which is that your mind is a tenuous web of intangibles moving in a realm of abstractions. You learned as much, of course, during your first year in the Tower. It is possible, of course, that the overworld is nearer the objective reality of the universe than the world of form, what you call the real world. Yet even there any good technician can see, at will, bodies as webs of atoms and whirling energy and magnetic fields.”

  Damon nodded, knowing this was true.

  “It is not easy to get your mind far enough from the agreements of what you call the real world to be free of time as you know it. Time itself is probably no more than a way of structuring reality so that our brains can make some sense out of it,” Leonie said. “Probably in the ultimate reality of the universe, to which our experiences are approximations, there is no experience of time as a sequence, but past and present and future all exist together as one chaotic whole. On a physical level—of course that includes the level where we are now, the world of images, where our visualization constantly recreates the world we prefer to see around us—we find it easier to travel along a personal sequence from what we call past to present to future. But in reality even a physical organism probably exists in its entirety at once, and its biological development from embryo to senility and death is merely another of its dimensions, like length. Am I confusing you, Damon?”

  “Not much. Go on.”

  “On the level of Timesearch that whole concept of linear sequence disappears. You must create it for yourself so that you do not become lost in the chaotic reality, and you must anchor yourself somehow so that you will not regress your physical body through the resonances. It is like wandering blindfold in a mirror-maze. I would rather do anything in this universe than try it again. Yet I fear that only in such a quest into time can you find an answer for Callista. Damon, must you risk it?”

  “I must, Leonie. I made Callista a promise.” He would not tell Leonie of the extremity in which the promise had been made, or of the agony she had endured, when it would have been easier to die, because she trusted that promise. “I am not a Hastur, but I will not forswear my word.”

  Leonie sighed deeply. She said, “I am a Hastur, and a Keeper, responsible for everyone who has given me an oath, man or woman. I feel now that if it were for me to choose, no woman would be trained as Keeper unless she first consented to be neutered, as was done in the ancient days. But the world will go as it will, and not as I would have it. I will take responsibility, Damon, yet I cannot take all the responsibility. I am the only surviving Keeper at Arilinn. Neskaya is often out of the relays because Theolinda is not strong enough even now, and Dalereuth is using a mechanic’s circle with no Keeper, so that I feel guilty keeping Janine at my side in Arilinn. We cannot train enough Keepers as it is now, Damon, and those we train often lose their powers while still young. Do you see why we need Callista so terribly, Damon?”

&n
bsp; It was a problem with no answer, but Damon would not have Callista made a pawn, and Leonie knew it. She said at last, in wonder, “How you must love her, Damon! Perhaps it is to you I should have given her.”

  Damon replied, “Love? Not in that sense, Leonie. Though she is dear to me, and I who have so little courage admire it above all else in anyone.”

  “You have little courage, Damon?” Leonie was silent for a long time and he saw her image ripple and waver like heat waves in the desert beyond the Dry Towns. “Damon, oh, Damon, have I destroyed everyone I love? Only now do I see that I broke you, as I broke Callista. . . .”

  The sound of that rang, timeless, like an echo, in Damon. Have I destroyed everyone I love? Everyone I love, everyone I—everyone I love?

  “You said it was for my own good that you sent me from Arilinn, Leonie, that I was too sensitive, that the work would destroy me.” He had lived with those words for years, had choked on them, swallowed them in bitterness, hating himself for living to hear them or repeat them. He never thought to doubt them, not for an instant . . . the word of a Keeper, a Hastur.

  Trapped, she cried out, “What could I possibly have said to you?” Then, in a great cry of agony: “Something is wrong, terribly wrong, with our whole system of training psi workers! How can it possibly be right to sacrifice lives wholesale this way? Callista’s, Hilary’s, yours!” She added, with indescribable bitterness, “My own.”

  If she had the courage or the honesty, Damon thought bitterly, to tell him the truth, to say to him, “One of us must go, and I am Keeper, and cannot be spared,” then he would have lost to Arilinn, yes, but he would not have been lost to himself.

  But now he had recovered something lost when he was sent from the Towers. He was whole again, not broken as he was when Leonie cast him out, thinking of himself as weak, useless, not strong enough for the work he had chosen.

  Something was desperately wrong with the system of training psi workers. Now even Leonie knew it.

  He was shocked by the tragedy in Leonie’s eyes. She whispered, “What do you want of me, Damon? Because I came near to destroying your life in my weakness, does the honor of a Hastur demand I must stand unflinching and let you destroy mine in turn?”

  Damon bowed his head. His long love, the suffering he had mastered, the love he had thought burned out years ago, lent him compassion. Here in the overworld, where no hint of physical passion could lend danger to the gesture or the thought, he reached for Leonie, and as he had longed to do through many hopeless years, he took her in his arms and kissed her. It did not matter that only images met, that they were, in the real world, a tenday ride apart, that no more than Callista could she ever have responded to his passion. None of this mattered. It was a kiss of such despairing love as he had never given, would never again give to any living woman. For a moment Leonie’s image wavered, flowed, until she was again the younger Leonie, radiant, chaste, untouchable, the Leonie for whose very presence he had hungered for so many anguished, lonely years, and tormented himself with guilt for the longing.

  Then she was the Leonie of today, faded, worn, ravaged by time, weeping with a helpless sound he thought would break his heart. She whispered, “Go now, Damon. Return after Midwinter, and I will guide you to where you may seek in time for Callista’s destiny and your own. But for now, if there is any pity left in you, go!”

  The overworld trembled as if in a storm, vanished in grayness, and Damon found himself back in the room at Armida. Callista was looking at him in dismay and consternation. Ellemir whispered, “Damon, my love, why are you crying?” But Damon knew he could never answer.

  Needless, Cassilda and all the Gods, needless, all that suffering, his, Callista’s. Poor little Hilary’s. Leonie’s. And the pitying Avarra alone knew how many lives, how many telepaths in the Towers of the Domains, condemned to suffer. . . .

  It would have been better for the Comyn, better for all of them, he despaired, if in the Ages of Chaos every son of Hastur and Cassilda had blown themselves to bits and their starstones with them! But there must be an end to it, an end to this suffering!

  He clung desperately to Ellemir, reached beyond her to clutch at Andrew’s hands, at Callista’s. It wasn’t enough. Nothing would ever be enough to wipe out his awareness of all that misery. But while they were all around him, close, he could live with it. For now. Maybe.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  Dom Esteban had asked them to delay the psi work until Midwinter was past and the repairs of the storm completed. Damon welcomed the respite, even while he felt sick with apprehension, with the need to have it over. He knew that a lot would depend on the weather. If there were another storm, Midwinter festival would be celebrated with only the housefolk, but if the weather were fine, all the people within a day’s ride would come, and many of them would spend the night. Midwinter eve dawned red and pleasant, and Damon could see Dom Esteban visibly brightened by the prospect. He was ashamed of his own reluctance. A break in winter isolation meant a great deal, in the Kilghard Hills, and more to an old man, crippled and chair-bound. At breakfast Ellemir chattered gaily about plans for the festival, taking up the holiday spirit.

  “I will set the kitchen girls to baking festival cakes, and one of the men must ride down to the South Valley and ask old Yashri and his sons to come play for the dancing. And if many are going to be sleeping overnight, we must have all the guest rooms opened and aired. And I suppose the chapel is shamefully filled with dust and dirt. I have not been down there since . . .” She faltered and looked away, and Callista said quickly, “I will tend the chapel, Elli, but are we to make the fire?” She glanced at her father and he said, “I dare say it’s foolishness, in this day and age, to kindle sun-fire.” He looked at Andrew, his eyebrows raised, as if, Damon thought, he expected the younger man to jeer. But Andrew said, “It seems to be one of the most universal customs of mankind, on most worlds, sir, some form of Midwinter festival marking the return of the sun after the longest night, and some form of Summer festival for the longest day.”

  Damon had never thought of himself as a sentimental man, had trained himself harshly to leave the past buried, yet now he remembered all the winters he had spent at Armida, as Coryn’s friend. He used to stand beside Coryn at Midwinter festival, with all the little girls around them, and think that if he ever had a family of his own, he would keep to this custom. His father-in-law picked up the memory and raised his eyes, smiling at Damon. His voice was gruff: “I thought all you young people thought it a pagan nonsense and better forgotten, but if someone can carry my chair into the court we will have it done, then, if there is enough sun for the purpose. Damon, I cannot go choose wine for the feast, so here is the key to the cellars. Rhodri says the wine was good this year, even if I had no hand in the making.”

  Andrew was returning from the daily task of inspecting the saddle horses when Callista intercepted him. “Come down and help me tend the chapel. No servant may do this, but only one connected by blood or marriage to the Domain. You have never been down here before.”

  Andrew had not. Religion did not seem to play a very great part in the daily life of the Domains, at least not here at Armida. Callista had tied herself up in a big apron, explaining as they went down the stairs, “This was my only task as a child; Dorian and I used to tend the chapel at festivals. Elli was never allowed down here, because she was boisterous and broke things.”

  It was easy to see Callista as a small, grave little girl, trusted to handle valuable and fragile things without breaking them. She said as they went into the chapel, “I have not been home for the festival since I went to the Tower. And now Dorian is wedded and has two little daughters—I have never seen them either—and Domenic away in Thendara commanding the Guard, and my youngest brother in Nevarsin. I have not seen Valdir since he was a babe in arms. I do not suppose I will see him now until he is grown.” She stopped and suddenly shivered, as if she had seen something frightening.

  “Is Dorian much like you and Elli?
”

  “No, not much. She is fair, as many of the Ridenows are. Everyone said she was the beauty of the family.”

  “I am reluctant to think all your family had defective eyesight,” Andrew said, laughing, and she colored, leading him into the chapel.

  At the center was a four-sided altar, a stone slab of translucent white stone. It looked very old. On the walls of the chapel were old paintings. Callista pointed, explaining quietly, “These are the Four, the old Gods: Aldones, the Lord of Light; Zandru, who works evil in the darkness; Evanda, lady of spring and growing things; and Avarra, the dark mother of birth and death.” She took up a broom and began to sweep the room, which was, indeed, very dusty. Andrew wondered if she herself believed in these gods, or whether her religious observance was merely formal. Her very contempt of religion must be something different from what he believed about it.

  She said, hesitating, “I am not sure what I believe. I am a Keeper, a tenerésteis, a mechanic. We are taught that the order of the universe does not depend upon any deities and yet . . . and yet who knows if it was not the Gods who ordained these laws which built things as they are, the laws we cannot refuse to obey.” She stood quietly for a moment, then went to sweep in the corner, calling Andrew to help her brush up the dust, gather the small dishes and vessels from the altar. In a niche on the wall was a very old statue of a veiled woman, surrounded by roughly sculptured children’s heads in blue stone. She said in a low voice, “Perhaps I am superstitious after all. This is Cassilda, called the Blessed, who bore a son to the Lord Hastur, son of Light. They say that from his seven sons were descended the seven Domains. I have no idea whether the tale is true, or only legend or fairy-tale, or garbled memory of some old truth somewhere, but the women of our family make offerings. . . .” She was silent, and in the dust of the neglected altar Andrew saw a bunch of flowers, left to wither there.